Drugs, booze, cheap motels. This is the real life of the majority of America’s pro baseballers

HERE is the real story of American pro baseball. The story that puts the “base” into the sport, as in the sordidness, the drudgery, the sheer boredom.

With two American pro teams down under this week to play the opening games of the 2014 Major League Baseball season, the focus is on glitz, on glamour and on two teams with a combined salary of $300 million.

There’s no doubt life can be extremely glamorous at the top of US professional sports. But scratch below the surface and it’s a different world.

A lot happens in pro baseball that we never hear about. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty ImSource:Getty Images

The minor league has three main tiers – Triple A, Double A and Single A (which is broken into two categories). From Triple A, it’s just one step up to the Majors, to “The Show”. But that step can be a huge one.

Even Triple A is a world away from the Majors. Here’s a snapshot of that desperate, often sordid world from a reporter who witnessed it first hand.

Booze

Baseball players drink, partly because they don’t always need to be the most athletic specimens in the world of pro sports, but also to pass the time. These guys play up to 160 Games in a season in the Majors or 140 games at minor league level. That’s six games a week for six months. Each night, win or lose, their adrenalin is pumping. A beer or two or seven or eight helps.

No team spirit

It’s a solitary game. Pic. Phil HillyardSource:News Corp Australia

Baseball, like cricket, is a team sport that is largely about the sum of individual performances rather than a bunch of guys working together as in the football codes. But it’s off the field that you really feel that lack of spirit, especially at minor league level. Guys in the minors would trample their best mate to get a promotion to the Majors.

Most players in a minor league club barely know each other’s names, let alone hang out together. There are exceptions, but for the most part it is a lonely, selfish mini-universe where the ethos of “one for all, all for one” is as foreign as a Frenchman.

This, right here, is the sport’s secret shame.

Cheap soulless hotels

All those games means a whole bunch of road trips. And road trips mean seedy hotels. At minor league level, a Holiday Inn is like the Hilton. More likely you’ll end up staying in some three star dump on a highway between Crapsville Illinois and Dumpsburg, Arkansas. Happily married and want your wife to accompany you on the road trip? Be prepared to dip into your own pocket for a double room.

Broken relationships

His character was called “Crash”, which is what happens to most relationships before theySource:Supplied

Sportsmen, like many in the entertainment industry, tend to have higher divorce rates than the general population. This is especially true in baseball, where divorce rates are said to be as high as 60 per cent. Women don’t exactly throw themselves at minor leaguers either, contrary to what the movie Bull Durham might have told you. So if you are single and looking for action, you have to put in the legwork. Which brings us back to the point about booze.

Cheap soulless apartments

And of course, when you’re home from the your road trip visiting some of the great three star establishments of the American heartland, it’s time to rest up in the apartment you’ve rented for the season, which will be about 16 floors up, painted white and grey, with fake granite benchtops in the kitchen and an artful, black-and-white framed poster-sized photograph portraying a forlorn figure crossing a bridge with an umbrella blown inwards by the wind. Could life be any bleaker?

Dodgy diet

You should see the gloop they eat after games in the clubhouse, as Americans call the dressing rooms. Sometimes it has ribs. Often it’s purple.

Drugs

This sign was made for New York Yankees player Alex Rodriguez, better known as A-Rod, orSource:AP

Last year in the minor leagues alone, at least 40 players were suspended for using performance-enhancing or recreational drugs – mostly the former, which are incredibly dangerous to players/ health.

Money (or lack thereof)

Depending on the type of contract they’re on, minor league players earn almost nothing compared to Major Leaguers, where salaries start in the millions. Even at Triple A level, a pretty handy player who’s played a handful of Major League games might be on just two or three thousand a month, with accommodation and meals which are only partially subsidised. It’s not hard to blow your entire pay cheque on beer.

The Nomadic lifestyle

When a player gets a pro baseball contract in America, he is typically signed by a Major League club and then put into what is colloquially known as the “farm system”, where he is farmed out to one of the minor league clubs which fall under the auspices of the Major League team. These clubs are often not even in the same state as the main team.

For example, the Arizona Diamondbacks – one of the two teams visiting Sydney this week - have four minor league affiliates. If they sign you as a promising young player, chances are you’ll first play in Reno, Nevada, in Mobile, Alabama, in Visalia, California or in South Bend, Indiana.

This means you could have several homes during your tenure at just one club. Change clubs several times, as many players do, and you could literally end up living in 20 or more towns and cities throughout America. Talk to players and they’ll tell you it stops being fun pretty quickly.

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